Abstract

With this special edition of the Journal of African Elections we attempt to show the importance of women to local government, both as councillors and as consumers of services. There is a substantive amount of literature dealing with local government elections, yet most of it is completely gender blind (see, eg,Hologram), meaning that it does not use gender as an independent variable to analyse election results, but neither does it use it as a dependent variable to engage in research from the starting point of women's lives.